.

.

.

.

.

Hi, and welcome to the Josh Marshall podcast. As you may have deduced, this is not Josh Marshall, but Kate Riga, reporter at TPM and co-host of the show.

Josh is out today for some personal matters, but never fear we were able to find another Josh to graciously step in at the last minute.

Josh Kovinsky, TPM investigative reporter, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me, kid.

We're going to talk about a lot of different topics today, but they all share a common theme, which is the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

You know, we're seeing it play out in Ukrainian cities, marked by bloodshed and destruction, and our Supreme Court flirting with a legal theory that accidentally threatens free elections.

And with a primary in Texas hallmarked by chaos intentionally unleashed by Republican lawmakers seeking to make voting harder.

So let's get into it. But first, the Josh Marshall podcast is brought to you by Grady's cold brew ice coffee. You can get a discount with code TPM at Grady's cold brew.com.

Okay, Josh, I want to start with Ukraine and Russia. Let's talk big picture, and then we can get into some recent stories about the conflict at home and abroad.

So to start, can you give our listeners a sense of the state of the invasion? Many people have probably seen some pretty devastating images out of an attacked maternity hospital recently, especially?

Sure. So I think that let me think of where to start. We're two weeks in, and Russia has not managed to take any kind of huge Ukrainian city that it's besieged.

There's only one large city they've taken in the South.

So you have her song, it's economically an important city. It's not the most important city, but it is a big kind of population center. Apart from that, they've laid siege to Mary Oubull in the east, very close to where the Ukrainians are already fighting Russian proxies as they hear.

They've laid siege to Harkiv in the northeast, and then they laid siege to Kiev in the north.

So I think we've seen over the past few days is the Russian momentum slowing quite a lot. People who know the stuff, whether or not I do, follow kind of military movements and have background in this, they're all kind of saying, like, the Russians have slowed down.

They aren't making any serious advances at the moment. And the question there I think is, are they doing that to regroup and change the strategy, or have they actually been fought to a halt?

It's not clear. I think the situation is probably different in different locations. There are several questions about supply chain issues, the Russians have been having about the right answer, their own troops to fight.

...